Ducks all business in Vegas

Steve Mims @SteveMims_RG

Monday

Mar 12, 2018 at 12:01 AM

LAS VEGAS — Oregon doesn’t believe that it’s playing with house money this week.

While most Pac-12 teams arrived at the conference tournament needing to hit the jackpot to advance to the NCAA Tournament, the Ducks are almost certain to get a third straight bid regardless of what they do at MGM Grand Garden Arena.

“We want to win it as badly as we wanted to win the first game of the season,” junior forward Dwayne Benjamin said. “It doesn’t matter if people say we have it, we don’t believe we have a tournament spot. We just want to play every game, every time and win every game we play no matter what it means.”

Oregon earned the No. 2 seed with a 13-5 record in conference play and will face No. 10 seed Colorado (15-16) in the quarterfinals at 6:10 p.m today. The Ducks watched the Buffaloes beat Oregon State 78-71 in the first round on Wednesday night.

Oregon is 23-8 overall and sits 29th in the RPI rankings, which has most prognosticators listing the Ducks as a No. 8 or 9 seed when the NCAA bracket is revealed on Sunday. The Ducks could move up with a couple of wins this week, but seem unlikely to fall out even with a loss today.

“We are not worried about the NCAA Tournament, we’re worried about the conference tournament,” said senior guard Joseph Young, the Pac-12 player of the year.

The Ducks have won their first game at the tournament in three of coach Dana Altman’s four seasons, winning the title in 2013 and reaching the semifinals in 2011.

“I’ve always liked conference tournaments,” Altman said. “Any time you get all the schools together and the competitive juices start to flow, it’s an exciting time. I hope our guys are excited about it because it’s going to be tough, but I like the challenge.”

Altman was voted conference coach of the year by his peers after leading the Ducks to a tie for second place.

“We’ve really just focused on what’s important and what the coach of the year wanted us to do,” said Benjamin, a junior-college transfer. “With us being so young, everything coach Altman does puts us in a good situation to be successful.”

Benjamin said the Ducks didn’t pay much attention to the preseason predictions.

“We didn’t have a lot of proving other people wrong, we wanted to prove to each other that we worked hard in the offseason and we didn’t want to let that go to waste,” Benjamin said. “We wanted to show we can really play.”

Oregon is 8-0 in games decided by five points or fewer, including its final two wins of the regular season at Stanford (73-70) and Oregon State (65-62).

“That helps our mentality,” Benjamin said. “If we get down in the tournament and have stretches where we don’t play as well, we have a lot of experience in close games.”

Oregon has helped itself late in games by making free throws at a conference-leading 76.5 percent. Young leads the conference at 91.4 percent while freshman Dillon Brooks and Elgin Cook rank seventh and 12th, respectively, at 83.0 and 77.5 percent.

“We get a lot of them up in practice and shootarounds,” Cook said. “We are shooting free throws all the time.”

Altman said those practice habits have carried over to games.

“I like their work ethic,” he said. “They came to practice every day and did what we asked of them. I like the progress we made. Some of our younger players matured in their approach to the game and the way they play the game. So there is a lot to like about these guys. They’re easy to work with.”

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